Rob Kaper and myself have collaborated on a summary of the happenings at last week's LinuxWorld Expo. We tell you what really took place at the most fabulous booth at the show <grin>. And don't forget to check out Rob's extended and hilarious picture gallery of the event!

The KDE Project used the occasion of
the LinuxWorld Expo in San
Francisco to show off the most recent release of the K Desktop Environment, KDE 2.2. The
Expo was also the perfect place to announce and demonstrate the new KOffice 1.1,
the KDE office and productivity suite.

KDE was represented by Bay Area locals Jim Blomo, Jason Katz-Brown and
Charles Samuels as well as Bohemians Waldo Bastian, Kurt Granroth, Rob
Kaper, Andreas Pour and Chris Schläger. Also present at the KDE booth with
the best of intentions were Paul Campbell, Bill Huey and Eunice Kim.

One of the highlights of the event was the announcement that KDE had won the
LWE Excellence Award for Best Open Source Project. After receiving the
award, it was proudly displayed at the booth by the developers present, who
felt it was great to see appreciation for the combined efforts of the entire
KDE community.

Over the three days that the exhibition was open, many visitors were seen
at the KDE booth. Most of them were impressed by the demonstrations given.
Most popular were Konqueror,Noatun-plugin Madness, the Internet
keyword architecture, renewed text editor Kate and especially the KIO
slave architecture.

Demonstrating the kio_audiocd plugin with the flair of a magician
("see, this is a regular CD") to rip and encode audio tracks to
MP3 and Ogg Vorbis almost caused some
visitors to leave the exhibition so they could install KDE on their
computers immediately. Also met with great interest was the mention of the
kio_freenet and kio_sftp slaves for respectively the Freenet distributed file network
and secure file transfers using SSH.

Interest from the media was also intense. Andreas was forced to purchase
lozenges to protect himself after the large number of interviews the
KDE League's PR firm arranged for him (thanks Eunice!). Earlier in the
week Andreas took part in a live interview and another recorded interview forTechTV, an international
technology cable channel.

One of the most frequently asked questions at the booth was the
difference between KDE and GNOME, the two most popular open source
desktops. Most users did not realize
that both projects share the same goals (improving UNIX usability) while
approaching them from a different technical point-of-view. Despite popular
belief, the KDE
developers and GNOME developers did not engage in WWIII but instead met
under friendly conditions. Andreas also met with Nat Friedman fromXimian in an effort to improve
relations and to discuss ways that KDE and GNOME can work together to make
Open Source more attractive to computer users. The meeting went very
well and concrete actions to improve KDE/GNOME interoperability were
discussed. Some of these ideas were already planned in a KDE/GNOME hackfest
to be held at the XFree
Technical Conference this November under the umbrella ofKeith Packard of theXFree86 Project.

Some other frequently heard requests were for CD's with KDE installed
and whether MieTerra's big stuffed Konqi could be given away. For various
reasons the KDE team could not comply, but were able to point to a page
on the KDE website with third part CD-ROM resellers and KDE merchandise. It should also
be mentioned that most Linux distributions ship with KDE, many of which have
it as the preferred or default desktop environment. We would like to
specifically mention both SuSE and Mandrake and thank them for the hardware
they contributed for the KDE booth. Another thank you goes to the KDE League for providing food for the
developers in attendance.

A photo impression of the event and the KDE booth made by Rob Kaper is available here.

Comments

> I think it would be realy cool if TheKompany.com came out with its own version of KDE

O please, no... It's enough complex now with as many KDE as distros...
As I already said elsewhere, I think that it would be better to define a standard KDE installation to be used by all the distros.

I don't speak about the compilation mode, but about the name of directories used and so...

I have read yesterday that for compiling a KDE app on Mandrake 8.0, it is necessary to do something like export KDEDIR=/usr/ What a foolish thing !! If Mandrake don't know how to install KDE, I wish that the KDE team explain how to do...

I repeat (sorry...) : the definition of a standard installation of KDE would be very useful for all the users.

KParts is not something unique to KDE.
GNOME has Bonobo, which does about the same job, but is based on
CORBA, whereas KDE chose to go its own way.
Red Carpet and Evolution may be Ximians products, but they are just as free
as the rest of GNOME and KDE.
Why is this any different than the fact that Trolltech has Qt as a product (free), and this is used by KDE. Both things are perfectly fine.

Btw. Ximian and The Kompany should not be compared too much. All of Ximians products are GPL, The Kompany makes proprietary products, which is fine, but
mean that they can never be part of KDE.

Galeon better than Konqueror:
1. Faster, both startup and rendering.
2. Better and more solid rendering.
3. Better support for plugins and java
4. Better handling of bookmarks (including the great auto-bookmarks feature
5. A fantastic feature in which you specify the default downloading-directory in
your configuration, and never have to deal with the whole "save as"-dialog
for downloading again.
6. Optional tabbed-browsing

Konqueror does have some neato features like more elegant cookie-handling and
anti-aliased fonts.
Evolution better than KMail:
1. Much, much better GUI
2. Faster
3. Included groupware
4. Incredibly elegant filter-handling
5. Incredibly elegant integration with GPG
6. Great search-features

KMail does have some better features like Outlook-importing.

Updating:
You have a very easy solution, that is really not good enough. THe distros
mostly freeze such packages between releases. Your own updating make
sure you can have the newest and best packages at all times. The only
distro that does this well enough is Debian Unstable.

Configuration:
Your solution makes sure that configuration is different on all distributions.
Besides Ximians configuration-tools are incredibly slick and better integrated
with the desktop-environment.

Is it really that hard to see that some things are actually better in GNOME?
KDE is NOT better at absolutely everything.

Opening konqueror inside KDE takes no time at all. And I think khtml is faster than gecko because like IE, it progressivly renders the page.

2. Better and more solid rendering.

Maybe. But not for 99% of most sites. The other 1% are nonstandard, sites with buggy HTML that Konqueror wants to avoid (such as sites with the tags), but could support if it wanted to. I think the next release of KDE will fix most of these issues.

3. Better support for plugins and java

I think you have this the other way around.

4. Better handling of bookmarks (including the great auto-bookmarks feature

I would not say better, the auto-bookmarks feature is nice.. But I like the bookmarks in the extended sidebar of Konqueror better.

5. A fantastic feature in which you specify the default downloading-directory in your configuration, and never have to deal with the whole "save as"-dialog
for downloading again.

You can specify the default downloading directory in Konqueror too. The avoiding save as feature sounds cool tho. However, does galeon have the ability to drag links to directories to save them? I think not.

6. Optional tabbed-browsing

Yeah, I wish Konqueror had this.

Konqueror does have some neato features like more elegant cookie-handling and
anti-aliased fonts.

Evolution better than KMail:
1. Much, much better GUI

That's quite subjective. In fact, I hate libgal (helixcode/ximian's widgets). Whole Evolution tries to be Outlook Express 5.0, KMail tries to be like PegususMail/Eudora/and Outlook Express 4.0. I think that is a huge difference there.

2. Faster

Seem same speed to me.

3. Included groupware

Again, this isn't the goal of KMail. Those features can be put into other apps.

4. Incredibly elegant filter-handling

So is KMail's.

5. Incredibly elegant integration with GPG

So is KMail's.

6. Great search-features

So is KMail's.

KMail does have some better features like Outlook-importing.

Updating:
You have a very easy solution, that is really not good enough. THe distros
mostly freeze such packages between releases. Your own updating make
sure you can have the newest and best packages at all times. The only
distro that does this well enough is Debian Unstable.

Actually, several other distros give you great updating tools. Mandrake and SuSE seem to be filled with KDE users, and they do.

Besides, redcarpet always has old packages (from my experience).

Configuration:
Your solution makes sure that configuration is different on all distributions.
Besides Ximians configuration-tools are incredibly slick and better integrated
with the desktop-environment.

Yes, but.. they do not work reliably under many circumstances.

Is it really that hard to see that some things are actually better in GNOME?
KDE is NOT better at absolutely everything.

1. true
2. true
3. I think GNOME still has not caught up with KDE 2.0. Do you know why? Because it lacks a stable compartment architecture that is in use by many apps. KDE 2.x has this. Gnome 1.0/1.2/1.4 doesn't. GNOME 2 will, but currently it is a bunch of test apps (now that Gtk2 is almost frozen, that should gradually change).

> Opening konqueror inside KDE takes no time at all. And I think khtml is faster than gecko because like IE, it progressivly renders the page.

Sorry, but that was a poor statement. :)
Unfortunatly (for you) Gecko features much better progressive page rendering than KHTML. That's why KHTML performes very badly on slow connections (and does not even work with constantly streaming content like webchats), it really shines for fast connections and local files.
Startup time is indeed nothing we should worry about. For some configurations Konqueror may be faster, for other configurations, Galeon may be faster. That's pointless.

> 2. Better and more solid rendering.

Here you (Cory) are right. I was impressed by the latest KHTML versions, it mostly renders "reallife" websites even better than Gecko. Partly because KHTML supports a lot of proprietory IE tags (Gecko does not).
Gecko has still more features (in the DHTML department), but most of them aren't used today or used very rarely.

> 3. Better support for plugins and java
> I think you have this the other way around.

Yep, I think Konqueror has better plugin support... I don't know about Java though, I rarely use it.

> I would not say better, the auto-bookmarks feature is nice.. But I like the bookmarks in the extended sidebar of Konqueror better.

It's a matter of taste of course, but Galeon really has a lot of amazing bookmark features. Like the "smart bookmarks". For example you can show those smart bookmarks in a toolbar and they will show up with an input box. You can insert text there and it's used as part of the bookmark. There are so many features, it's unbelievable. :) It really shows that the Galeon developers spend their WHOLE time on the GUI (nothing else).
You can say what you want, but the Konqueror shell just can't compete with the Galeon shell. You can compare Konqueror with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer doesn't stand a chance against Galeon as well (as the GUI).
And if you think you know Galeon: Make sure to check the latest version, it's unbelievable how fast they progress.

> You can specify the default downloading directory in Konqueror too. The avoiding save as feature sounds cool tho. However, does galeon have the ability to drag links to directories to save them? I think not.

That works with Konqueror? Let me see...
Yeah, that worked. But Konqueror hung after moving the file to trash. Damn. Fortunatly it wasn't crashed, it just hung for a few minutes! I thought I had lost all this text! :)

> Yeah, I wish Konqueror had this.

Agreed, Tabbes are the number one feature of Galeon. Never saw them implemented that great.

I don't comment all those mailer questions. It's a matter of taste. Evolution IS great. But KMail is great as well. While KMail is clean and simple, Evolution is powerfull and has some very neat features which makes your life easier.

> Because it lacks a stable compartment architecture that is in use by many apps.

Is "compartment" a mixture between "component" and "parts"? ;)
Yes it's quite nice. But guess what? It's not THAT important.
And it's not true, that Gnome 1.4 doesn't has it. It has.
Bonobo is already there. It's just not used that much yet (Nautilus beeing the exception).
I'm getting tired of hearing "KDE is superior because of KParts" all the time. :)
To me it's mostly image, the practical gain is there, but not THAT important.

IMHO KDE and Gnome are too different, to be compared in a "A is better than B" way. Like GNU/Linux and Windows or XFree and DirectFB.

It'd be neat to have tabbed browsing in Konqueror, but if you really want/like tabbed browsing, use Opera. It's tabbing is a bit more advanced than Galeon's is (mainly because it has the ability to have a unified workspace as well).

As for the rest of us who actually have the screen real estate (like most people), we'll use konqueror or mozilla.

Oh no, how stupid (sorrysorry!).
Opera is one of the uglyst browser I know.
1) The HTML engine is crap.
2) Fonts are crap.
3) It's no KDE app, so what?
4) Tabbed more advanced than Galeon? LOL
The MDI of Opera is AWEFULL. I never liked it. I want tabs, not windows in windows!
And it does not even feature half of the features that Galeon feature! Err... you know what I mean. Tabs are pretty simple in Opera.
5) You are FORCED to use this tabs! Ugly!
6) The tabs bar does not disappear when only viewing one document, so screen estate is wasted all the time.
7) Screen estate? I use a 19" Monitor with 1600x1200 resolution. Surprised?

It's obvious, that you never worked with the latest versions of Galeon.

Why does Galeon provide faster download speeds when I use gnome compared to KDE?
I would much rather use KDE because its honestly easier on the eyes but at the same time it is all about the SPEED. Is there anything that I can do to boost the performance in KDE?
When I go to www.bandwidthplace.com with Gnome and Galeon I avge 1.5 - 1.8 Mbps
WHen I use KDE & Galeon I get about 1.0 - 1.3 Mbps
and most depressing of all is when I use Konqueror I get 500Kbps - 900Kbps

I have to deal with the very untrue parts here first:
1. You think plugin-support is actually _better_ in konqueror? Yes, it may support some ActiveX in development-versions, but when it comes to standard plugins Mozilla (and thus Galeon) truly smashes Konqueror.
For instance, Konqueror claims to support Java fully, and Flash, but so far, in all the latest versions of KDE (I've used every version from the 2.0-betas), it has never worked properly. Java is slow, or doesn't work fully, and Flash just hangs and crashes any other browser apart from Netscape 4.x and the mozilla-based ones.
2. Opening Konqueror inside KDE _does_ take some time. Galeon launches instantly on my laptop, Konqueror 2.2 still uses around 3 seconds.
Even if some of your arguments against Red Carpet and Ximian Setup Tools are at least partially correct, it does not change the fact that GNOME _has_ these, while KDE has none whatsoever.. and even though you think they are not necessary, I do, and plenty of people do. Besides, my integration point is very valid, and so is my point on regular updating.
I'm not saying that GNOME is technically at KDEs level right now, but there ARE areas where GNOME is superior, and the KDE-people seem to be incredibly defensive on this point (not the developers... the users).

1. It's a bitch getting java to work in mozilla or galeon.
2. Speed of Java execution has nothing to do with konqueror or galeon. It has everything to do with the speed of the jdk.
3. Konqueror loads in less than one second in KDE. Make sure you use "kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing" (the dcop interface to launch it). Galeon loads in less than one second in GNOME. Seems like a tie to me.
4. Flash has always worked for me in Konqueror. I was amazed on how integrated it seemed.

It is simple to get java to work in Mozilla... it might not have a GUI-tool, but it is easy. The problem is that the GUI-interface for selecting java-vm in Konqueror has never worked _at all_ for me.

ln -s /pathtojavavmplugin /pathtomozilla/plugins

Thats it, and it works perfectly.
Perhaps Konqueror seems slow at java because it hasn't used the correct plugin, but falled back to kaffe or something, in which case it is probably both mine and Konquerors fault.

Anyhow, even if I misunderstood the plugin-issue, Mozilla/Galeon still renders better, has better support for current and coming standards (like xml), and gecko does not hang bad as khtml sometimes does. The only big issues where khtml is better is anti-aliasing (but AFAIK Mozilla can be compiled with Qt for the same result), and memory-consumption (and not a big difference here).

Konqueror's plugin support is excellent, although it is at most on par with Galeon's. Flash works wonderfully in Konqueror. Those of you who think Konqueror has problems with Java, y'all must be trippin'. Because I use the latest 1.4 beta java plugin with both browsers and Konqueror actually loads it faster. Believe it or not. I play Yahoo games quite a bit so I know what I'm saying.

Oh yeah, and startup speed. Apparently those who use Gnome or some other WM complain that Konqueror's start up is slow. Answer: because when you load up Konqueror (or any other kde app for that matter) in an environment other than kde, it has to run the kdeinit scripts and some other stuff first to get its act together. It's a testimony to the beautiful component integration that exists in KDE...once that whole engine is started up, everything else loads up pretty quickly. For me, first time I load up Konqueror takes about 2-3 seconds. Any other KDE application after that loads up almost instantly.

I don't even worry about that as much as the application's speed/responsiveness. I find Konqueror to be a many times more responsive than Galeon (which means it responds to button clicks and stuff like that pretty much instantaneously). That is why I still prefer Qt to GTK+, because it simply seems to be better designed and faster responding. And KDE's component architecture also appears for me to be more responsive and quicker than GNOME's in all my experience with both environments. No further comments about that.

And I don't fathom what some of you folks are saying about bloatishness. I personally find many gnome applications to feel more "bloatish" than KDE applications. KDE feels mature, stable and responsive. Gnome always feels like an obese beta beast in most of its apps .. Galeon, GIMP, Evolution, etc. So I don't know what the heck you fellas are talking about.

Speaking of Galeon, I agree with that previous comment saying that tabs are its best feature. If there's anything I would really miss in Galeon, it's the tabs. Opera's tabs suck. Galeon's tabs ROCK. Konqueror needs to get tabs. As for smart bookmarks, I don't really miss them. Because in Konqueror I can easily type gg:search_request in the address bar to search the internet, or fm:progname to search for software - no time wasted, no productivity lost for me.

It is for these reasons that I have chosen Konqueror as my default web browser. (and by the way, I use enlightenment for a desktop, so I'm pretty much on neutral ground). I have used Galeon for a while and I found it to be pretty cool (in fact, I still use it from time to time), but Konqueror is simply better. 'nuff said.

I don't really like galeon's tabbing much.. it feels way too limited compared to Opera's. For example, in Opera, you can switch from single page view to multiple cascades of windows (or tiles of windows).

Seriously, I think opera was the first app that implements MDI right. for any future tabbing/mdi implementation in konqueror, I think it should probably be moddled after Opera's (since it is a superset of Galeon's tabs).

khtml is still the most standards compliant engine around.. not to mention the fact that konqueror loads pages faster and reders better than mozilla or galeon. it also feels much more responsive, and the gui is consistant (the scrollbars are actually consistant with scrollbars in other apps :-) ) also, I think more plugins work with konqueror but I'm not sure (I haven't setup java or flash with mozilla yet).

Personally i disagree with most KDE fan posts. You must be using some
misconfigured system, because i mesaured resource usage of both KDE and
GNOME, and the latter always used less resources (MEM and CPU), needs less "kdeinit" style daemons, and integrates better with different software. If you like KDE, great, but please stop
flaming (those comments about smoking crack... please stop it).
The distribution thats being used is an important factor. For example SuSE works best using
KDE, Gnome doesn't work well on SuSE, because it includes stone age like versions, that aren't
properly setup. RedHat or Debian work equally well with Gnome or KDE.

Alright, stop shooting up heroin... You're replying to posts from nearly a year ago (Oct 2001). Did you notice the timestamp?

Anyways, whatever they said a year ago isn't necessarily true anymore with the rapid pace of development in KDE and GNOME. They are both getting close to each other in terms of feature sets. Use whatever one you prefer and stop catering to trolls.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist). I found this because, as a new linux user, I'm still trying to decide which to use. I'm using Debian, which defaulted to gnome, but I installed KDE, too.

I'll have to admit, I like Kontact much better than Evolution for email/calendar. And Konqueror is a nice file manager. But when I was running Suse with KDE, after editing the menu, it went to hell and wouldn't display a lot of the programs until I added some fake entries, for some reason. Don't know if I did something it didn't like, or if the menu editor is just buggy. But gnome isn't very easy to edit either.

Well, I don't feel well saying "KDE is better than Gnome" because I tried Gnome only for a very short time.
But I what I can really say, you can configure konqy any way you want to make it look whatever you want, to have menus und toolbars the way you want, you can use styles to make your whole KDE look different, you can use your own funky icons, and I'm only aware of exactly two features konqy doesn't have, otherwise it has more or less all features you could think of :-)

Bye
Alex

what makes me think, having a menu editor like the toolbar editor would be a good idea...

Not really. You can't edit the menus (and they are a mess btw) and you can't edit the toolbars like you can do with Galeon (try it). For example I never managed to get the stupid extra buttons of the toolbar and the locationbar into the standard toolbar.
And did you try to move the toolbars around while dragging them on their handle? It's unbelievable, how bad that works. :) I messed up everything and had a hard time dragging them back like they were. ;)

> you can use styles to make your whole KDE look different

Sure, and so you can use Gtk engines. ;)

> you can use your own funky icons

Hmm well. Galeon can use the Nautilus Icons. Nautilis themes are pretty cool. I don't know how to choose some nicer buttons for Konqueror without changing my desktop theme. Do you?

> otherwise it has more or less all features you could think of :-)

Nah, you should play a bit more with Galeon. ;)
I used both Galeon and Konqueror a long time and only Konqueror for the last time, it indeed IS lacking a lot of features. Most important of all is the tabbed browsing.

> what makes me think, having a menu editor like the toolbar editor would be a good idea...

Even better would be a clean and simple menu structure, not the mess that Konqueror menu's currently are... Compare that to the Galeon menus.

I don't want to bitch, Konqueror is great. Just not perfect...
It mostly suffers from beeing an "all in one" app, which isn't the best idea IMHO.

Yep, but Nautilus does not even TRY to be a Webbrowser. It's just a filebrowser with the ability to show HTML pages.
The same should Konqueror do and there should be an alternative KHTML Webbrowser that concentrates ONLY on webbrowser (so it can compete with Galeon).
ATM there is no equivalent to Galeon for KDE.

Err, why? Because of the skin? Well, some people prefer applications with "charakter" and a nice skin above apps that "all look the same". :)
All that matters is that dialogs, etc are Gtk, so it DOES fit in.

> Same for Mozilla.

Mozilla is for everyone!
If you want a Gnome browser, try Galeon. Fits perfectly. And is btw a better browser GUI than Konqueror. :) But currently I like KHTML better than Gecko. It's lighter and it has great rendering for *current* websites. Gecko is a beast and very capable when it comes to JavaScript and DOM. Most pages don't use that very much yet, so KHTML fits my needs very good. You just can't say that Konqueror is the better browser. It's a matter of taste and as I said, Galeon is definetly the better browser UI than Konqueror (could be because Konqueror is a "let's view and edit everything" application. ;)) Something like Galeon for KDE and KHTML would just rock. Well, maybe that's something I could try to code. :) It shouldn't be that hard to embed KHTML into a new app, right?

> I would miss the internet awareness of KDE.

The what? :)
I don't see a difference in "internet awareness" when using KDE or Gnome.

> Everything just looks the same, behaves the same and so on. Gnome is pretty, but not as streamlined.

That's a matter of taste, not an argument for one of each sides. :)
"Everything the same" can be nice, but "everything looks different" can be just as nice as well. Gtk/Gnome has the advantage, that Gtk and Gnome apps look the same, that's really bad with Qt and KDE (fortunatly this will change with Qt3 and KDE3 AFAIK :)).

> And I would miss stable true type font support with AA.

TrueType support is just as (un)stable as in KDE... and AA is a cosmetic detail, which isn't perfect in KDE either. I needed a long time since it didn't look awefull anymore... but I have to admit, once it's configured nicely, it's very good. :)
But really just a detail and Gtk will have this soon (it already has, just not "official").

> Abiword e.g. is nice, but not very gnome specific.

Who cares? All that matters is, that all Gtk apps look and behave the same.
There is no such thing as "the Gnome desktop". "Using Gnome" basically means, that your desktop mainly consists of Gtk apps and Gnome-Libs are installed. Most of the time you will also load the "panel" and if you like, you can use the Gnome session-managment.

> Finally Red Carpet: What is this? "Red Carpet, the update tool for ximian is a killerapp" It does not work with my distribution, it will trickily remove KDE (from what I have heard), it will modify my stystem. How is updating an "killer app" ? Check out SuSE You or Debian aptget. Same thing. Not very desktop specific.

(It does not remove KDE anymore!)
Yep, that's the point. It's distro specific. Red-Carpet is just gold on a Red Hat system, while it's absolutely useless on my Debian box. I figured that Gnome fits perfectly in a Red Hat system, while KDE runs great on SuSE and especially Debian (I'm currently writing this from KDE 2.2 on Debian 2.2 ;)).
I have Ximian GNOME installed on my other Linux partition with Red Hat (I use this for gaming and KDE for coding).

It is generally accepted that GNOME has not cought up with KDE 2.0 yet. Even most GNOME developers will say this (they point to Gnome 2.0, which seems to be a collection of test apps right now).

Kmail has ALL the email features that Evolution does. The extra stuff in Evolution are either features that are in other KDE applications (such as knode).

Ximian desktop and menus bloated compared to KDE? hah. I think you have that the other way around. Nautilus is WAY more bloated than konqueror is.

Other than that, I think GNOME development has basically slowed down to a point that it will take 1). a long time for GNOME 2.0 to be released 2). continue to lose market share, after getting a lot of market share with GNOME 1.2.

Slowed down? Dude, look at the mailing list, look at the CVS commits! The project is on steroids!
The only reason why people think GNOME is not progressing is because they don't release as often and because most work is done on the architecture rather than user-visible things.

> Ximian desktop and menus bloated compared to KDE? hah. I think you have that the other way around. Nautilus is WAY more bloated than konqueror is.

Well, besides of that you somehow screwed up in this sentence, the menus of Nautilus are WAY more clean and simple than those of Konqueror.
Yes, it's not a big deal from a technical point of view, but for the enduser experience, those are almost the most important things. It's just fun to use. KDE should learn from it instead of looking down to it...
KDE could be a great desktop if they would do more usability testing.

I am a fan of both KDE and GNOME, and I use apps from both environments. However, I have been using GNOME as my main environment since the 1.0.x days. I should add that I am not trying to troll. I am simply stating why I like GNOME over KDE in order to provide constructive criticism for KDE (and some for GNOME as well).

I have found that nothing can beat the configurability of the Sawfish WM and the GNOME panel. There are literally hundreds of keybinding options for Sawfish, and it is very easy to configure an environment that requires no mouse use at all. Sawfish is also very extensible, with its own LISP-like scripting language. There are Sawfish scripts available on some websites, and many add unique and interesting functionality. It is still very user-friendly, and a great deal can be done via its GUI menu options. If you don't like Sawfish, GNOME makes it easy to switch to another WM (I sometimes use Enlightenment or IceWM instead).

In the panel department, the GNOME Panel is extremely configurable. You can put panels wherever you want, and even have them floating in the middle of the screen (not off an edge). They can be any size you want, and its applets (e.g. the Deskguide and Taskbar applets) tend to have more configuration options than applets for other types of panel. This is just a small fraction of what it can do.

GNOME most certainly needs some polishing when it comes to little things like drag-'n-drop support. It is more loosely-coupled than KDE by design. This has been beneficial in that you can add/remove components (e.g. WMs and desktop managers) as you please, giving the user more choice and flexibility while creating a spirit of healthy competition and co-operation (yes, you can have both) amongst developers. However, it is also a disadvantage in that it is less integrated, making it less user-friendly for the newbie.

I believe that GNOME is like this because its focus in the past has not been the ordinary user, unlike the KDE Project. GNOME was made by hackers for hackers, and has only targetted ex-Windos users comparatively (to KDE) recently. This is meant to be addresseed by GNOME 2.0 and beyond, but I doubt that GNOME would (or could) fully dump its previous development method (i.e. loose and flexible) for a more integrated KDE-like approach. After all, the developers have the final say in what direction the project takes, and I can't imagine veteran GNOME hackers dumping their old beliefs. The more options that you give someone, the harder it is to integrate them, and the more likely it is that you'll confuse the user. In other words, there is a trade-off between user-friendliness and configurability, and this is GNOME's predicament. They are doing a good job (IMHO) at picking defaults for some things and limiting the amount of choices to the user, so that they don't become confused. For example, the Sawfish configuration options has a beginner/intermediate/expert setting to determine which options are made available to the user. Nautilus has a similar setup. However, more work needs to be done here.

I remember reading an article recently about Ximian, which stated their three target markets. The first is existing GNOME users. It is far easier to keep a customer than to gain a new one. Ximian supports distros like Red Hat and Debian better than they support distros like Mandrake and Suse because there are a much larger proportion of GNOME users in them. The second is the underprivileged. This diverse group includes schools, poorer people and nations, and the disabled. There is much usability work going into GNOME to enable things like mouseless operation, which is vital for many people. The third target market is the corporate desktop. This is the area that is receiving the most support, through contributions by corporations like Sun, HP and Red Hat. Evolution, for example, has been deliberately engineered to be a drop-in replacement for MS Outlook (hence the same look and feel), which has become firmly entrenched on corporate desktops. I am not a programmer, but from what I have read it appears that Kparts is more suited to single desktop than to a large network, whereas Bonobo (which is based on CORBA) is built for the enterprise (CMIIW). This can explain why GNOME chose a CORBA-based solution over something faster, like Kparts.

Note that in the three target markets I just mentioned, there is no mention at all of the consumer desktop market, which is where KDE is mostly pointed.

But what does this mean, really? This phrase 'built for the enterprise' keeps on being trotted out as if it's a) meaningful b) a good thing c) applicable to CORBA. CORBA is an over-engineered, bloated by design specification which you can only implement quickly by not supporting large parts of it. It is completely unsuitable for fast inter-process communication. DCOP is a fast, light interface which can be extended to the network if necessary (via SOAP, if nothing else).

You should make things as complicated as necessary, but no more. CORBA is too complicated to be the solution to the problem DCOP solves.

The best free UNIX web browser - along with Mozilla (which is more standards compliant, but has created YET ANOTHER completely new set of widgets to bloat your memory with)... and that's only a small part of what Konqueror does. File manager, ftp client, Audio CD ripping front end... it's what Nautilus could have been in about 2 years if Eazel had spent another 30 million (!) on it.

2) Kate / KWrite

Now this is a lovely text editor -- pity it doesn't have Python highlighting like the 2.1 KWrite did, though.

3) KDevelop

Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

4) The new printing architecture

If I had the money I'd send the guy who wrote this £50 as a thank you. Combined with CUPS this FINALLY makes KDE as a whole a decently integrated system.

--
Other reasons:

Whenever I use Gnome the dark and blurry icons hurt my eyes.

KDE has a pretty dragon mascot. Gnome can't even manage a whole leg.

KDE actually seems to have been people developing it in the last year. It's finally reached the stage with 2.2 where it feels polished.

I don't like the arrogance and attitude of De Icaza. You can trust Germans. (and this is coming from someone from the UK :)

> it's what Nautilus could have been in about 2 years if Eazel
> had spent another 30 million (!) on it.

First everybody whines about Eazel's existence, and now everybody whines about it because Eazel *doesn't* exists?
Honestly, those guys have done great work and sacrificed their company, and you bitch about that?

Besides, add CD-ripping features is quite easy: just write a gnome-vfs module.

> KDevelop
> Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

I tried KDevelop a month ago (yet again), but I still don't like it.I prefer Anjuta instead, which feels much more comfortable to me.

> 4) The new printing architecture
> If I had the money I'd send the guy who wrote this £50 as a thank you.
> Combined with CUPS this FINALLY makes KDE as a whole a decently integrated
> system.
Gnome-print can be easily extended to use CUPS by writing a backend for it.
Besides, the default PostScript backend can be configured to use CUPS.

> I don't like the arrogance and attitude of De Icaza. You can
> trust Germans. (and this is coming from someone from the UK :)
If somebody is arrogant then it's those who oppose De Icaza's *opionions*.
Whenever he has an opinion about something, people bitch about it.

I can't help but noticed that you keep saying it is easy to implement this and that in Gnome.
It proves that these things haven't implemented yet while in KDE it has.
Whether it is easy or not to do that , well... it is quite easy to make such claims, but people really believe you when you have finished the job well.
But since we haven't seen any proves then we don't believe you !

That's a cheap shot, man.
Talk is easy, but when I ask you to prove it, you can't. Instead of show us what gnome is planning to do or something, you simply said "look at the architecture..". Gee.. anybody can do that.
Oh, well..at least we know what type of people you are.